Ny (overraskende) viden: All the concentration camps had slogans on their gates. Often it was Arbeit Macht Frei (Work makes you free). However, in Buchenwald, a labour (not a death) camp – although many thousands of people were worked to death or deliberately killed there – the Nazis chose the motto Jedem Das Seine (To Each What They Are Due). It was placed on the inside of the gate rather than the outside, so that every prisoner was reminded of it as they looked to the world outside. The words are a powerful statement – and in this context a complete and provocative perversion of any notion of justice. They are the German translation of the Roman law maxim Suum cuique, incorporated not just into German law but legal systems across Europe. They are the title of a Bach cantata performed in Weimar, the city of Goethe and Schiller, just 10 miles from Buchenwald. And this gate, so close to Weimar, raises the unanswerable question of modern German history: how can these different components of the German story fit together? How could all these humane traditions of justice and scholarship, music and law – of a civilised society – all collapse in the Nazi abyss? The Nazi authorities conscripted one of the inmates of the camp to design the words. Franz Ehrlich had been interned as a communist on trumped-up charges of treason. He had trained at the Bauhaus, the famous school of design, also in nearby Weimar, which was loathed by the Nazis for its internationalism and modernism. Ehrlich nonetheless used a beautiful Bauhaus typeface of the sort that the Nazis categorically disapproved of. Astonishingly, they didnt seem to notice. It is impossible not to read the sign as a quiet, profound protest. Ehrlich was compelled to design this hateful, callous motto, but he did it in a way that showed that another Germany, a humane, international Germany, survived. These shocking words in that typeface suggest that people, even in terrible circumstance, may sometimes find a way of asserting dignity.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 22:13:21 +0000
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